563: 19 Business Ideas Free for the Taking

0:02It's time for another round of the Business Idea Giveaway Show, in which we donate business ideas to you and all we ask in exchange is that you take action on them. for that and that you hit that follow button and that subscribe button in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, in the YouTube, wherever you're watching, wherever you're listening to this because that helps more people find the show. I'm your host, Nick Loper. This is The Side Hustle Show. It's the business podcast you can actually apply. Joining me today is a longtime friend and friend of the show, a serial entrepreneur who's built not one, but two seven-figure businesses starting both as side hustles from mywifequitterjob.com.

0:38Steve Chu, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back, Nick. This episode, the one that we did last time, was a lot of fun, so I figured let's go for round two. You bet. It was a hit. So we recorded the Business Idea Giveaway episode in September. So this was like episode 530. Super popular episode, over 70 ,000 downloads already. So like any good podcaster, like any good entrepreneurs, right? It's like, you know, notice what's working and let's do more of that. So we're back for another round of that. Before we get into it, Steve's got a new book coming out. It's the Family First Entrepreneur, How to Achieve Financial Freedom Without Sacrificing What Matters Most.

1:13Make sure to pre-order your copy before May 16th at thefamilyfirstentrepreneur.com to claim over$600 in free bonuses, including what I thought was really cool, the Family First Side Hustle Challenge. So looking forward to checking that out. Now, I want to kick off this list. One of the cool ways to kind of just get your idea generating juices flowing is to go to sites like explodingtopics.com, which is kind of like Google Trends, but it feels a little more curated. And when I was on there recently, one of the exploding topics that popped up to me, or kind of like got the light bulb going for me, was Core Web Vitals.

1:52This is Google's metric of how user-friendly your site is in terms of page speed, user experience, a bunch of other factors. And so if Core Web Vitals, and the chart is up and to the right, lots of people looking for information and assistance around how do I improve my Core Web Vitals score? A couple different paths that I see this potentially going as a side hustle, as a business idea. The first is learn these skills yourself. Watch the YouTube videos. Become educated on this. Maybe you start on Fiverr. I'll help you improve your Core Web Vitals score. $50,$100, kind of low-ticket service. You learn on the job.

2:29You improve your skills. Second path would be to partner with somebody who already knows this stuff and then go be the marketing arm, start the productized service around this, where for a flat fee, we'll optimize your site. And then because it's kind of a moving target, like they are changing what goes into this Core Web Vitals score, have a lower monthly recurring service. Like, we'll make sure you're always up to date with the latest changes here. So that's idea number one for me, this Core Web Vitals. And I was inspired by a search on explodingtopics.com. I'll tell you this, Nick, when I was messing with my core web vitals, and for everyone listening, this is essential for ranking your website in search.

3:07I painstakingly did this all by myself. And yes, I would have gladly paid a service to help me with that for sure. Yeah, it's a pain. And it's like, you know, they give you all this technical language. And even then they tell you, well, here's your recommended action as a basis of this lower score that you got. And you're like, I don't know what to do with that information. Like you're still speaking a foreign language, Google. So yes, I think a big opportunity. Google's horrible at this. They use all this technical jargon that just confuses people. So yeah, great idea, Nick. So mine is something that I've been actually just thinking about for a very long time.

3:42It's not technical. It's basically a service that holds you accountable. And maybe this is because I do this with my kids like every single day. Did you do your homework? Did you work on this? Did you make any progress on your project. And I found that, so I've been teaching a class for like over a decade now on how to start an e-commerce store. And what I find is that people, it's not because they aren't smart or anything. It's because they need someone to just hound them, not to hound them, but just to ask the question like, Hey, did you make progress? Did you actually do what you told me that you were going to do this week?

4:14And the service could be as simple as, Hey, uh, you just receive a text message like once a week asking you if you accomplish the goals that you set the previous week? Yeah, that could be an easy one. I'm surprised when I see some of these, even just membership services where there's not a huge level of content added where we tend to think as content creators, well, if I'm going to have a membership, it's got to like have this huge library of content. It's like, no, sometimes the membership is just like show up or I'll ping you with this accountability message. Like you kind of know what you need to do, but, you know, just to have somebody kind of looking over your shoulder, even in a virtual way, I think that could make some sense.

4:56And my next one kind of plays along with that because we've witnessed the power of gamification. I'll give you the examples. My son, my oldest son's in first grade and, you know, he reads a decent amount, but we just got done with a month of what they call the eager reader program at school. I don't know if your elementary school has had this for your kids, but you know all of a sudden now it was a contest and he was reading two sometimes three hours in a day because it was like being quantified and measured against his classmates and so my idea so google or apple rather is coming out with their you know augmented reality glasses it's like how do we gamify some of the bigger challenges that we face as a as a country as a planet like with obesity and environmental problems like if we could you know you remember the like cigarette ads or the stop smoking ads from the 90s where each cigarette is 14 minutes off your life or something.

5:50If we could have in our field of vision as we're choosing between different menu items at the restaurant, well, the steak is minus 14 minutes and the salad is plus 15 minutes or something. Some way to gamify these decisions where we inherently know the right path to choose, but we don't because we choose whatever feels better in the moment. So I'm trying to think of that, how to gamify health in a way that would have wide-scale adoption and actually spark some change there. So, a funny story is Fitbit. When my wife and I first got a Fitbit, we joined this group of our friends and we would have weekly contests on who would have the most steps for the week.

6:31And my wife does not work out at all. And she ended up getting like 35 ,000 steps in one day. Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot of steps in one day. Yeah. She's not tall. That's like 10 or 12 miles. Yeah. Yeah. And to win the contest, that's what she did. So this gamification totally works. And if it works in fitness, it can probably work in health. You just got to find the right metrics. Yeah. Cause I use like the, my fitness pal app off and on to track meals and stuff, but it's kind of a pain. Like there's a lot of friction involved. And so if there's a way to make it more seamless and more integrated into your day, like without having to open an app and log in.

7:09I don't know. Like all of that stuff kind of makes it more of a pain. So maybe there's something coming down the road with the glasses or the future, you know, augmented reality dashboards and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So my next one has nothing to do with tech. It is rent a garden. Now here's a problem that we've had. Like my wife and I, we always wanted to start a vegetable garden. The problem is we plant these things in our backyard and they inevitably die mainly because we don't have the right conditions, but we really want to start this garden and start eating the food that we grow. So, what I thought of was if there was a place that just had nice soil and they maintained everything for you, watered the plants and just made sure it had sunlight, if you could plant your own seeds there and then harvest your own crops and that sort of thing and they would just make sure your plants would live, that would be a lot of fun.

7:58I think that'd be a great service to have. We'd be all over it. Yeah, it'd have to be somewhat nearby to the neighborhood. You wouldn't want to like be, you know, commuting half an hour to go tend to your plants or anything, but I can see that working. Yeah. I mean, they would tend to it also for an extra fee. Like you could start a business where you, you know, you would take care of the plants basically, and they would have the fun of watering or they could come and take care of it also. Yeah. This is us every, every summer as well. Like, well, here, you know, at the end of the summer, here's our$17 tomato.

8:28Like, great. I'm glad we just didn't go to the store and get this. But there's some pride in cultivation there. And we've seen a couple. There was one near my apartment in college, kind of like a community garden where I don't know if they charged rent for each row of the thing, but you can see people out there gardening. Actually, our neighborhood HOA maintains one too. They call it like the neighborhood pea patch where you can go and have your own little plot. But I don't think they're going to maintain it for you. So maybe that's an upcharge. I was just thinking about this because we just got back from Japan and a lot of the restaurants that we ate at actually grow their plants right there.

9:03And there's a lot of farm to table here in California also. Yeah, we had a hard time finding vegetables that weren't tempura fried in Japan. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so that's number four, rent a garden. If you're new to the show, you found it. Awesome. Thank you for tuning in. Now you might be saying, hey, this is, this stuff is really interesting, all the side hustle stuff. And you might say, look, there's 550 plus episodes in the archives, where do I start? Well, if you're not, because here's what you do instead. You go to hustle.show, answer a few short, multiple choice questions, and I'm gonna build you a personalized playlist that you can add to your device.

9:40You can learn what works and you can start making more money. So that's at hustle.show. Thank you for discovering the show. Hopefully you find your custom playlist over there. Number five for me is what I'm calling the Kids Summer Program Aggregator site. So what we have learned is that, you know, during summer break, and I'm very much of the position, like, you know, the what's the book, like 18 summers or something like, look, this is time off for the kids. I'm like really grateful to have a flexible schedule, but like 10 weeks off consecutively, that's too much for both parties. Like the kids get tired of us, like we get tired of them.

10:14And so, you know, but it's really disjointed. And so this would require a lot of local knowledge on what different summer camps and programs are available, when the registration dates are like to pull all of that together would be hugely valuable for parents. And it's just it's really disjointed, like registration times happen. You know, some of them are in March. Some of them don't happen until the end of April. And it's like, well, you know, how are we going to balance this out? And some level of like calendar visualization would help, too, as we ended up having to like, you know, print out a physical thing, like try and block off the weeks that we wanted to.

10:46be off, to travel, to go hiking, to do whatever. And then the week's like, okay, hey, go play soccer for a few hours over here during this camp or something. I love this idea. Summers are always a major source of stress for this family here because of the summer camps. And they're like all over the place. Some are really expensive. Some only last a week, some last two weeks. And yes, if there was a service where I could just say, hey, pick me three camps that span this time period and it automatically sends me to the signup forms or even signs up for me. That'd be fantastic. Yeah, there's the next level of AI there.

11:21Just do it for me. Exactly. I mean, these are all great services that can easily be done actually without any money to start. Yeah. You know, it's funny how all these ideas that we've come up are just based on things that we recently had to go through. So, I just mentioned that I got back from Japan and there were just some ethnic foods over there that I wish were in the United States, but they are not. So what I just thought of literally last night when I kind of flew back, what's the start in ethnic foods, monthly box, right? So basically you just, Hey, I want a box of cool stuff from Japan every single month.

11:55And you just send that same box to a bunch of people that can be really scaled easily. And you can just cover countries and it gives you an excuse to travel and expense it also. I like that. Would you focus like solely on one country or would you say, we're going to travel the globe. Over the course of 12 months, you're going to have 12 different countries sent to your house. I think I would start out small by just focusing on one country, but there's no reason why you can't focus on many countries. And that gives you an excuse to travel as well. Yeah. Somebody was doing, I want to say there was somebody was doing this for Canada and it was like the Canadian gift box, like for people living in the States, they couldn't get certain products.

12:32Or I want to say actually a listener of the show was doing this for Hawaii, where their business was based on travel and tourism in 2020. That completely went away. It's like, well, how can we bring the islands to our customers if they're not coming to us anymore? Well, we could send them these subscription boxes or something. So I like that. That's kind of a cool one. I think there's definitely some validation that's already been done on that front. So we're kind of playing the curation and the marketing game on the ethnic foods monthly box. So for number seven, let me pitch you this. so did you know that laughter may actually be a key to longevity so this is in the national institutes of health participants in a multi-year study actually in japan participants in the study who reported laughing more frequently lived longer and had significantly fewer instances cardiovascular disease than their non-laughing counterparts so how do we make laughter like a daily vitamin and i would even i'd be the first to admit like okay this is probably not going to cure cancer, but I am pretty sure you're going to feel happier.

13:37You're going to feel more grateful after a good laugh, after a good chuckle. That's why I'm proposing the Laugh Reminder app, which will ping you at least once a day with a funny video, a funny story, a clip of somebody laughing, you know, bonus points if it's a friend or a family member with a great laugh. And the inspiration for this actually our youngest son, who has had just this amazing uncontrollable giggle, like ever since he was a baby and he still has it. He just turned five and he's like, let's check. Do you still have your gigs? Like, okay, yep, they're still there. And we go back and watch those videos of him as a baby all the time.

14:12It brings back all this happy memories. And so I think this Laugh Reminder app could be sold as a key to longevity and just a general gratitude practice. So would this Laugh app be composed of your own videos or curated by somebody else? Yeah, I think you could upload your own or you could, you know, here's a, if you have a famous celebrity laugh or something, you could probably have a few of those stocked in the app, but then you could upload your own to make it more personable. Nice. I like that. We all need to laugh a little bit more in this world. Since we're talking about apps, here's one that I just kind of recently came up with.

14:49I'm going to call it SteveBot only because it's my own bot, but I was just thinking about something that I'm going to do with my classes. I'm going to upload all transcripts of all my videos, all my podcasts. You should do this too, Nick. And then you could just have people pay to talk to the bot. And because it's all of your stuff and all of your content, it's just like asking you that question personally. So, for example, in my class, right, let's say they have a question on e-commerce or something like that. They would just ask the bot. And then based on how you've trained it, which is based on all the videos that you've already given, you get the right answer.

15:26You could also do this with your kids. If you could somehow program your bot to be like you and all the answers that you typically say like, hey, daddy, can I go eat some cupcakes right before dinner? It just says no. This is something that you're actually building out for your content library? I am building it out. So I'm transcribing all the videos and everything. And I'm going to try to train a bot to answer quick questions for me. That's kind of cool. Is it a white label of a customer service app that already exists? No, it's not. You have to use the ChatGPT API, and you just feed stuff in.

16:02But it's basically creating a robotic clone of yourself, and it's entirely doable today. That is pretty slick. Yeah, because there's hundreds and hundreds of podcast episodes to go back through. And we do get some of those, even in the Facebook group, somebody just asked, Hey, there was a guy, he was doing tutoring or he was helping people learn based on neuroscience principles. Who was that? And it's like, outside of my brain, people probably aren't going to know who that was. It's like, oh, I think that was William from this episode. Here's the link to that. But yeah, if there was an automated way to do that, where it could somehow plug in those keywords.

16:39Yes, this is the one you're talking about. Nope. Steve bot. All right, we'll put that down as number eight. Number nine is actually a service that already exists, and this is called PodReacher. It's a podcast repurposing service, so taking somebody's library of content and translating that into Twitter threads, into short clip videos, into other assets for social media. And so this is founded by Jacqueline Schiff, who reported revenue of$420 ,000 in mid-2022, which she posted on Starter Story. So I think this is kind of an example of a business that catches a rising tide, like as more and more people are podcasting, but podcast discovery still remains a really challenging problem.

17:26Well, how can we take the content that you're already creating and help you get some more mileage out of it? And so her service helps you go out and do that. And I think there's probably some similar services that exist. So I think that's kind of one to think about, I guess, the broader framework of catching a rising tide. but then the specific example of this repurposing business, like helping people get more mileage out of the stuff they're already doing. Is this service, is it humans or is it AI that's curing the content for you? I think it's humans at this point. Okay. So they literally go through all of your episodes and pick clips for everything.

18:00Nice. I like that. I like that a lot. Well, maybe, I don't know. Maybe it's AI at this point. I think it definitely started out as humans because she's been at it for a few years. Okay. Cool. I like that idea. I like that idea. All right, here's another idea. And again, it just so happens that it's because Easter just passed. So, my friends, they throw these elaborate Easter egg hunts where a friend like bought a bunch of lottery tickets and cash, candy and everything. And he put together 2 ,500 eggs and hid them around his property. Wow. And had a whole bunch of people over to do these Easter egg hunts.

18:36So, my idea, and again, it can be for any occasion. The Easter just happened to be the only one that I came. But a service that basically stuffs these eggs with whatever you want and then literally just hides them around your property. It's basically an Easter egg party thrower. Okay. Because it's very tedious to do all that stuff. And these parties are a whole lot of fun. They're just a pain in the butt to set up. So basically a party thrower for Easter in this case, just because it passed. Yeah, packing all of these eggs individually. Yeah, that takes a lot of time. 2 ,500 eggs. There's a local megachurch by us, and their sign was like, 60 ,000 eggs or something.

19:18Oh my God. Oh yeah. Okay, yeah. Very seasonal business, but that could totally work. And it could parlay into one of the ones we had, like, luxury picnics or something was one that we profiled a couple years ago. I was like, you know, lots of, you kind of, you know, go from one holiday to the next, to the, you know, go to the next seasonal thing here. It might be tough, especially if you're like, oh, I got three orders. Like I was supposed to stack, you know, 10 ,000 eggs in one night. I got to go hide all these things.

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22:15But one thing that I love, like all of these or almost all of these are born from like personal pain points or challenges. And that's really where a lot of business ideas come from is, you know, necessity is the mother of invention in some way where it's like, oh, you see something and you observe something. It's like just a slight twist on that. You know, how would I spin that to be my own thing? So the Easter egg party service is number 10. And another one actually that came from pain points, and you mentioned like the AI bots, was you're trying to plan an annual, you know, Friendsgiving trip for us.

22:47So you've been probably 15, 16 years of doing Thanksgiving with the same group of friends we started doing in California. But now they're in Michigan and we're in the Northwest and trying to be like, well, where do you want to meet? And we're like, OK, our criteria is we want to meet somewhere warm in these dates. but the hours that we have spent on different flight search engines and trying to find, well, what's it cost for them to fly? What's it cost for us to fly? Where do you want to stay? What do you get there? It's just nuts. It seems like a computer ought to be able to solve this so much faster.

23:17Like, look, here's the criteria. Here's where we're coming from. Here's how many tickets we need. Just find an option that isn't obscenely expensive and let's go to town on that. And same thing for reward travel. So that's kind of like the group travel angle but really the reward travel too. It's like, look, can I plug in my bank? And maybe something already exists. Can I plug in my bank of ultimate rewards points? Can I plug in my Amex points, my Capital One points, my United Miles, my whatever? All of these different accounts that I have and you tell me the optimal use for it. Like, hey, we're thinking of doing something in Southeast Asia in the spring or we're going to Europe at this time.

23:55Where can we go? How do we get there? How do we get the family there in the optimal way? Because there's all these little hacks. Like, well, if you have a layover here, You can have a free connecting flight and all this. And it can be really tedious. I feel like the robots might be a better operator for that stuff. When we plan these trips, the hardest part is actually settling on a time rather than the planning and logistics. Like the logistics is one thing. But so we just plan, like every year we try to plan between four families and between like everyone's kids' activities and work schedule and all that stuff.

24:28So we use, I think, Doodle. Is that still around? My wife uses Doodle, I think, to figure out the times. And then you're right. What's going to work for everybody. Yeah, when that's going to work. And then, yes, then we have this huge thread, usually in WhatsApp, where we're trying to decide the most optimal way and where to hit. So we started basically just going on cruises as a result because it's just too much logistics-wise to plan one of these trips. Yeah, it's a challenge to crack that code. and it's like, yeah, we want to keep this tradition alive, but there was an easy button thing. It's like, yeah, it was cheaper for us to fly to London than it was to fly to Mexico or something.